Blog Introduction

Welcome to my laser blog! This blog will be filled on a - more or less - regular basis with all kinds of different topics that maybe aren't worth official press releases or are a bit off topic. This blog will usually be maintained and written by myself. If one of my colleagues posts here, the post will be marked with the respective initials.

Laser Blog, all about laser lights around the world

The price development of show laser light systems is an interesting thing: Within only a few years the prices for show laser light declined rapidly and the lasers became affordable to a mass market. A completely new generation of laser enthusiasts and companies that earn their living with laser and light shows aroused. The changes in technology cam rapidly and impacted the existing laser show market really hard: Companies that relied on gas laser systems needed to switch their mind and others that were used to add extremely high margins to their systems lost their competitiveness within a few months only. This all happened when the affordable, small laser light systems came to the market. Laserworld was amongst the first brands that were recognized in the market with small, well-priced laser light systems. Laserworld skipped the gas laser era and started their business with solid state show laser light systems: Simple DPSS laser light sources were used, but very soon after the first steps things moved to multi-color show laser lights.

I thought that the 1W RGB laser light systems would be a good base for comparison, so I drew a small chart showing the price development of the smallest, analogue modulated RGB white light system, that was available from Laserworld in the very year (except the gas laser system – which is included for comparison purposes only). Data source are the historic price lists of Laserworld and my experience. Prices shown are net retail prices, so of course dealer pricing was better – at least for products from 2009 on. For gas laser systems there wasn’t that much discount in the past.

One more thing to mention is that the show laser light systems also grew in technology – and thus in visibility: Whereas the gas laser system in 2005 still was a massive apparatus with water cooling and enormous power consumption, the smaller solid state laser light systems that were offered by Laserworld didn’t have these disadvantages any more – they were all air cooled devices. The first solid state RGB white light laser systems were usually equipped with green and blue DPSS lasers (where blue was at 473nm – so more a cyan color), and red already was created with diode laser sources (however, there were also DPSS red laser solutions in use).With the development of the 637nm red diodes, the price per diode raised again, but the visibility was much better, so were the beam specifications. That’s why this color spectrum took over for the entry-level semi-pro systems. Soon afterwards the DPSS 473nm cyan-blue DPSS were substituted with 410nm ultra-dark blue lasers, but this era didn’t last long, as very soon the 445nm royal blue diodes became very much cheaper and thus took over as standard blue laser source in modern show laser light systems. The blue diode lasers were developed further, so they now run at 450nm, but the general technology behind is the same.

The chart above shows the price development of a low level 1W RGB white light show laser light system, however the development of the possible overall laser powers per show laser light projector increased a lot through the years. Nowadays more than 110W white balanced RGB laser light is possible, even for graphics projections, and there is more to be expected very soon. Laserworld and their subsidiaries continuously drive the product and technology development – some great new steps to further milestones in laser light development are to be expected.